Description

Allow wesnoth to support spritesheets

Page for the idea: SoC_Ideas_SpriteSheets

Wesnoth units are made of thousands of small png files, each containing the image of the unit in a given stance. This has the advantage of (arguably) being easier for artists. However this has a huge cost in term of memory usage. The point of this SoC would be to allow wesnoth to support spritesheets : huge images containing a mosaic of all images and related tools/code support

There are no submitted student proposals for this idea

Additional Information

currently, all the wesnoth unit animations are based on png images, each image representing the unit in a single pose. In a spritesheet approch, each unit is represented by a single,huge, image where all the unit images are put on a mosaïc pattern and the game knows where to look for a given image.

the spritesheet approch has huge gains in term of memory consumption, but there are a couple of problems that need to be solved

how to build those huge sheets from our current images set
Wesnoth does not have a fixed number of frames per unit, nor does it have a fixed size for each unit frame. A naïve approch to the problem will not work